My 21st century adult life is more hectic than my late dad's 20th century one, and nothing will change that fundamentally. But with a little bit of effort and a little bit of scheduling tenacity, we can make certain that we don't let holiday work overrun the most important task of the holidays.

Our full-time jobs require our presence at frequent early morning and late evening events, plus occasional weekends. All of our extended family lives a plane ride away, and paying for a nanny --- not in our budget! We get by by making significant sacrifices to our careers and our pocketbook.

Victor Hugo visited his barber daily; I haven't had a haircut in 15 months. Balzac consumed as many as 50 cups of coffee per day; I recently switched to iced green tea. Every day, Charles Darwin built in three walks and some idleness; I forgot to exercise this week.

Too many of you are treading water instead of swimming with the current, living in a reactive state instead of a place of creating opportunities, and overwhelmed with all of the decisions you have to make and then never quite get what you want.

What's taken me by surprise, at least lately, is that I am often pleased when those scheduled-in-advance plans get canceled. They always sound like good ideas when I make them, yet as it gets closer to the time, not so much.

With my kids back in school, the relatives flown back to their assorted states and my bags finally unpacked from our summer excursions, my mind drifts back to the series I began in August on choosing a dog or puppy to suit your lifestyle.

The less frustrated and disappointed we feel, the less likely it is that our attempts to create shared emotional closeness will be experienced as criticism by our partner, and consequently, the less likely it will be that they will respond defensively to us.

One of the great struggles of any creative profession is coming up with an ingenious and original idea in a timely manner. Lightning strikes of inspiration are often few and far between, which makes it hard to convince people to give you money for your ideas.

Rather than discussing the pros and cons of striking Syria today, we have to point out something which should be glaringly obvious -- that Congress will be continuing their fifth week of vacation rather than returning to Washington to vote on whether America should go to war.

Life rarely perfectly follows a plan. But that doesn't mean that you should just give up and not make a plan. It means that you should embrace a realistic expectation of what planning can and can not do for you.

Small business owners have difficulty in picking a way of knowing what to focus on. To shed some light on this topic, I interviewed Scott Belsky, co-founder and CEO of Behance, the leading online platform for creatives to showcase and discover creative work.

Union Park's attendees waded in mud at times and baked under the relentlessly hot sun at others during Pitchfork's eighth annual festival. Besides the battle against the elements, festival goers had plenty else to engage them, as the weekend offered a palate of surefire hits and miscalculated flops.